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November 2012

November 30, 2012

Free Autodesk Certification exams have been one of the most popular additions to AU in recent years. This year, we offered Professional Certification exams for 6 products. As of Thursday morning, attendees took 1,966 Professional exams compared to 1,400 last year. Which exams were most popular?

36% AutoCAD® 2013

37% Autodesk® Revit® 2013

14% AutoCAD® Civil 3D® 2013

10% Autodesk® Inventor® 2013

3% Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2013

We also offered beta versions of the new Autodesk Certified User exams for AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit to 100 attendees. The tests are designed primarily for students to test their skills. Response was positive, and these tests will be made available now for the North American market, and expanded globally in February 2013.

Many attendees took advantage of the online preparation classes offered on the AU website prior to the conference as well as on-site preparation classes at the conference on Tuesday. Others also caught on to the fact that they could take exams on Monday before the conference started, leaving the rest of their week for classes and other AU activities.

If you’re planning to attend AU next year, consider adding Certification to your AU schedule. Autodesk Certifications are industry-recognized credentials that can help you differentiate yourself from the pack and create more opportunities to advance your career.

Yesterday’s inspiring Innovation Forum “Everyone is a Designer” really brought home (literally for them, in some cases) the ability to:

Dramatically increase the speed with which new products can be brought to market.

Use the power of the Web to collaborate with creative minds around the world.

Access today’s design software for the masses.

Bring manufacturing out of the factory into the home office.

Eric Wilhelm, kite surfer and founder of Instructables.com started Instructables as a way to erase the barriers to inventing by helping people share what they’ve made with others. The site now hosts 85,000 projects.

David Lang, treasure hunter and co-founder, OpenROV, described his organization as “DIY ocean explorers.” Using Kickstarter, OpenROV was able to raise over $100,000 dollars to build their first generation of underwater robots. David’s main point is that from his perspective, the Maker movement and “democratization of design” is not do-it-yourself, but rather, a community collaboration. His personal quest to reskill himself turned into a great adventure. Now people all over the world are helping him reach his goal of creating an inexpensive, effective underwater robot for ocean exploring. Today’s technologies (3D printers, laser cutters, etc.) are easy to learn to use. Everyone can participate in the process of designing today, and “we’re all exploring this together.” His advice: Go out and find your own treasure.

Making his second appearance at AU this year (his first was at the Keynote Address), Schuyler St. Leger, enthusiastic amateur maker, talked about his own evolution using 3D printers and electronics as an example of the ability of youth to learn and push boundaries on technology. His own projects take advantage of inexpensive tools like Arduino boards and MakerBot™ 3D printers to be creative and inventive. Where did he learn all this? He said “Not from public school.” Shuyler’s own creative spark has been supported by his parents and others in the Maker community.

Jason Chua and Rachel Star of SparkTruck, an educational build-mobile from the Stanford d.School felt that the increasing standards requirements in public education were making it harder for kids to be creative. At a Maker Faire, they met Schuyler and he inspired them to start thinking of ways to take some of these technologies and transplant them into the classroom. Starting in the Bay area, they outfitted a truck and over 4 months traveled all over the U.S. with their program. Teachers and students said it was some of the most fun they’d had in years. They teach brainstorming, prototyping, and storytelling. For many students, this is “their first experience in unfiltered thinking.” Jason and Rachel’s goal is to “spark more young designers around the country.”

Anne Filson and Gary Rorhbacher, partners at Filson and Rohrbacher and co-founders of AtFAB, set out to create a new model for how designers create. If you define design as “recognizing the agency in yourself to change the world and you act on it,” then you are a designer. Anne and Gary want to live in a world where everyone is a designer by this definition. To promote this new way of thinking, they started AtFAB to “provoke consumers to become makers.” On the AtFAB website, a half-dozen personal parametric interfaces (furniture objects), such as for material thickness, enable anyone to design their own furniture. These furniture objects can be cut by a CNC router, laser cutter, or water jet from any off-the-shelf sheet material. One of their goals is to create an alternative to the centralized factory, by shipping “info not stuff.”

One of the forums most dynamic speakers, Ben Kaufmann, founder and CEO of Quirky.com, noticed how in recent decades, “we’ve become an incremental culture” and “invention has been replaced by innovation.” Companies mostly offer products that are incrementally better or different, and the pace of new product introductions has slowed dramatically. But he knew it could be different. His goal was to “make invention accessible” to everyone. Instead of taking 3 years to bring out a simple product, Quirky.com launches 3 brand new products every week. Product ideas come from people around the world, and then Quirky.com uses a combination of technology and community experts to bring products to market quickly. All involved get paid every time one unit of a product sells. What’s your next invention?

A recording of this session will be available on AU Virtual on the AUTV tab.

November 27, 2012

This year’s keynote address looked to the present, focusing on the amazing technology that is available today. Jeff Kowalski, chief technology officer for Autodesk, set the stage by showing us how we see the world through our tools. New tools make it possible to expand our vision of what we believe is possible, but they also can limit us. So it’s Autodesk’s mission to keep expanding the outer boundaries of what our tools can do. Guest speakers included Dezso Molnar, Gyrocycle® inventor; Christine Furstoss, technical director of Manufacturing & Materials Technologies at GE; and Schuyler St. Leger, enthusiastic amateur inventor.

Tools to Capture the Early Stages of Design

According to Jeff, today’s technology can help us capture the early conceptual stages of design, with tools like Autodesk® 123D® and Autodesk® SketchBook®. Engineers can scope out various functional ideas before they are built. In addition, simulation is shifting from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Using examples like the Microsoft Xbox recall and the design of the Shanghai Tower, he explained how engineers can now bring data into the picture early at the conceptual and functional stages of design, potentially saving their companies billions of dollars.

The Third Industrial Revolution

Other tools are addressing the changes in manufacturing today—from experience-based innovation to knowledge-based innovation. In this Third Industrial Revolution, the industrial world is embracing digital design. Christine Furstoss, general manager of technology at General Electric, took the stage to explain how manufacturing capabilities are starting to enable designs, rather than the other way around. Today, we are building not only the parts, but also the properties of the materials that go into the product. Digital manufacturing is calling for an industrial ecosystem where everyone works together. In manufacturing, the virtual world is collaborating with the physical world, opening up design possibilities.

Working in a Connected World

These new demands are requiring true connectivity so project teams, according to Kowalski, can have “persistent awareness and robust context,” giving us the ability to spot problems early and address them quickly. The cloud is more than a “great hard disk in the sky,” said Kowalski. It enables a single connection point. Cloud-enabled tools can help.

This connectivity (along with personal fabrication tools, like inexpensive 3D printers) is enabling the “democratization of design tools” where even kids like guest speaker Schuyler St. Leger can design things and produce them in days. The entire design and manufacturing process is shrinking in time and becoming something anyone can do.

Enter Autodesk Fusion 360

Autodesk CEO Carl Bass not only described some of the powerful cloud-enabled products and services that Autodesk currently offers, but also used this opportunity to announce Autodesk® Fusion 360, a cloud-based 3D CAD solution. Bass said that Fusion 360 helps you manage your data, and you pay only for what you use. You can take advantage of the ideas of others in your professional community to inspect your designs and suggest solutions. CAD and CAM are finally connected.

The full recorded keynote will be available on AU Virtual on the AUTV tab.

November 26, 2012

The AU Leadership Forum (AULF), a conference within a conference, is off to a great start, beginning with last night’s networking reception. Designed for C-level executives, AULF attendees are already having many beneficial conversations with others that move beyond the introductory level. One attendee said he had an hour-long conversation with an architect last night where they started talking in detail about how to collaborate on projects.

Today’s keynote, featuring Autodesk VPs Callan Carpenter, Jon Pittman, and Phil Bernstein focused on the tectonic shifts that are taking place in business as a result of evolving technology. Callan Carpenter, who opened the session, described how technology is still important, but only to the degree that it is used to solve business problems. This trend is affecting all of us, no matter what our business.

Last year Autodesk announced a major shift in the way it does business—moving to the cloud, mobile, and social. The underlying trend and the driving forces behind this decision are tectonic transformations, where over time:

Products are becoming services.

Transactions are becoming relationships.

Functions are becoming experiences.

Many of these trends are manifesting first in the consumer realm before they reach the business realm.Here are some examples presented by Jon Pittman and Phil Bernstein:

Trend #1: Moving from Products to Services

The Millennial generation, especially urban residents, no longer think in terms of owning a car, which most of us use only about 3-5% of the time anyway. They are moving from owning and using products to using services.

On the consumer side, we’re learning to match resources to needs much better than before. Car services such as zipcar.com or uber.com match consumption to need. Get the car for when you need it—no storage, no insurance, no obsolescence to worry about. Companies such as Spotify for music and Netflix for movies have changed the model from purchasing a product to using a service. Rent the Runway makes high-end fashions more accessible and almost as easy as renting a movie from Netflix. STEAM is a completely virtualized gaming environment where you get into a relationship with a gaming company that is continuous.

On the business side, Rolls Royce now rents jet engines by the hour. They own and maintain the engine, deal with the insurance, and so on. McKinstry, which started life as a mechanical, electrical, and plumbing subcontractor now designs, manufactures, and installs the entire building environment. They connect everything in a building to a digital sensory network and set up a contract for long-term system maintenance. Autodesk now offers software on demand, such as Autodesk® Simulation 360.

Trend #2: Moving from Transactions to Relationships

Under the old model, book sellers, such as Waldenbooks, focused on making transactions. That model has mostly gone away. Today’s model is more about building relationships based on trust, where the company is more like someone who knows you. For example, when you do business with Amazon.com, the company keeps track of what you order for yourself or as gifts, makes recommendations, and stores your payment information. It’s the ethos of Amazon, according to John Pittman, that makes it work. Decisions at Amazon are made in favor of the customer. Also on the consumer side, Garmin Connect keeps track of your running history, and lets you connect (and compete) with other runners.

On the business side, through a Strategic Innovation Partnership between Nike and Autodesk, the two companies are working together to envision the future and to co-create it. Autodesk is learning how Nike views manufacturing and human performance.

Trend #3: Moving from Function to Experience

In the past, differentiating your company on function was the most important goal. The primary function was often around “saving the customer money.” McDonald has successfully used the functional approach: cheap food prepared quickly and efficiently on a massive scale. In contrast, the restaurant Tao provides an Asian-themed dining experience, where food and service are designed to tap into the image of who you are and what your aspirations are.

At Walmart, a master of the functional approach, you can buy Nike products at a good price. But people still go to the Nike stores for the experience. The same goes for Apple stores—selling an experience has been immensely profitable for them.

Manufacturing has traditionally been about making objects. But Lexus has changed the way people think about a car company, working to get people into a continuous relationship with service facilities that create an experience for the consumer and thereby create brand loyalty.

Service, relationship, experience…these are the megatrends that are shaping industry today and in the near future.

If your AU 2012 registration username and/or password contains special characters, such as “@” “#” “!”, you will not be able to log in to the mobile app. Use the following instructions to change your account information:

November 20, 2012

You can view the #AU2012 Socialcam feed. Plus, you can let other AU mobile app users know what you're doing and where you are at AU and update your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn activity feed with a single check-in.

Earn “Badges” for a Chance to Win an AU 2013 3-Day Conference Pass

This year, you can earn app "badges" when you check in at certain events, visit exhibits and lounges, pass Autodesk certification exams, and make contact with other attendees.

Watch for QR codes on signs at those locations. Every badge you earn increases your chances to win an Autodesk University 2013 3-Day Conference Pass!

The AU 2012 mobile app is available for Apple® iPhone® and iPad®, as well as Android™ smartphones and tablets.